OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T Review – Top 3 Android Phone of the 2016

The best phone(s) for the year 2016 is, for me are OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T. Since OnePlus is a newcomer to the mobile phone world, they often called as flagship killer. From my perspective, I don’t think they should be call flagship killer, well not anymore, they are flagship themselves. OnePlus 3 and 3T are the example of how flagship should be made and priced.

THE OnePlus 3, which is an earlier model, was announced in June this year, 2016 of course, and 5 months later, in November, OnePlus the 3’s little identical brother. It’s not like Meizu Pro 6 Plus vs Meizu Pro 6, it’s more like UMI Plus and UMI Plus E, they are really and truly identical.

Design

The little brother maintains it’s big brother design. The design is just elegance, with rounded edges from all sides from the front body, left, right, top and bottom. It’s body, which is made from unibody aluminum, have this solid build and elegance at the same time. The unibody also means that it is difficult to be fixed if anything broke. The 3/3T display is pop out a little from the unibody. For me, 3 words that best to describe the OnePlus 3 and 3T are “Simple, Elegant and Solid”, SES.

From the front of the body, we can see three side buttons popped out a little bit. Its right side is the power buttons, which can be used to launch camera app by double-tapping. On the left side, the are 2 buttons which are the volume control and the alert slider, the one like the iPhones have. There’s also this dual SIM card tray above the power button, which is invisible from in front of the body or back.

The home button is a ceramic-coated fingerprint scanner and there are also two soft touch buttons beside it. There is a setting that can be set to change between these soft buttons and software buttons. If you want to change it go to Setting -> Buttons -> On-screen navigation bar. Oh yeah talking about, setting, you can also choose a dark mode where all stock apps become black, from Setting -> Customization -> Dark Mode.

From the back of the OnePlus 3/3T, there are only camera module, a small flash, and OnePlus logo and that’s it. It just so simple and elegance. And one more thing that I like about this elegant phone, apart from it whole body design, its simplicity. I mean, there no company name in front of the body and there’s a single, just a single logo at the back, and no more.

Specifications

The size(s) is 152.7×74.7×7.4mm in inches they are 6.01×2.94×0.29, which is, I think, palm-friendly for most people. The 3/3T display is 5.5-inch packed with 1920×1080 pixels. One thing about this display, it uses Optic AMOLED, which is same the same as Super AMOLED, but a little better where OnePlus tune it a little bit so that it looks better.

The processor is a little bit different both 3 and 3T. The big brother, 3, comes with Qualcomm MSM8996 Snapdragon 820 that is four cores with 2×2.15 GHz Kryo & 2×1.6 GHz Kryo clock. The little brother comes with Qualcomm MSM8996 Snapdragon 821 with also four cores but the clocks are 2×2.35 GHz Kryo & 2×1.6 GHz Kryo. 821 gives the 3T 10 percent lesser boot times and 10 percent app loading time reduced as well as Snapdragon VR SDK, you know for virtual reality.

For memory, both of them comes with 6GB LPDDR4, which is crazy, since there is no, not that I care off, flagships have that amount of memory. In storage terms, the OnePlus 3 comes with a single option of 64GB, even that is good enough, while the OnePlus 3T comes with two options of 64GB and 128GB. While we’re on the option part, both of them come with two color options with the 3 are Graphite and Soft Gold, which is apparently turned really pale, and the 3T are Soft Gold and Gunmetal.

One more thing that makes the difference between 3T and 3 and other flagship is the cameras. The rear camera for both 3 and 3T is 16MP which is, I think that almost the same as most flagship. But I’m talking about the rear camera, I’m talking selfie camera, the front camera. The 3 comes with 8MP which quite common, so, I think, OnePlus decided that we need to double the camera and they did it on 3T with 16MP.

Software

OnePlus is known for their own customized OS called OxygenOS. They keep maintaining their product by continuously updating them to fix bugs. And talking about updates, OnePlus have announced, as a new year gift, that the 3 and 3T have received OxygenOS 4.0 (N). OxygenOS 4.0 is based Android 7.0 Nougat. This update is available via OTA.

At The End

Specifications

Value for Money

Summary

I think this is the best phone of the year 2016. The specifications are over–the–top out of all Android phone available. The design is beautiful and elegant. And the best of the prices are way lower than most flagships. One more thing, the OnePlus 3 is no longer available OnePlus online store, the only way to get them is AliExpress or Ebay. One Two more things, currently OnePlus 128GB is not available at its online store and there is no words that both phones have any IP certification.